 and welcome to another episode of In the Studio. My name is Jeff Shaw, and I get pulled in here sometimes to host these shows, especially when they have to do with biking, because I'm a biker myself, a bicyclist, and I'm excited today, especially, because we have a very special guest who is a very much a bike advocate. Welcome, Maria. This is Maria Contreras-Taybot, and anyway, thank you for coming in today and talking all about what your work's been going, what work you've been doing in the Davison Wooden, the Yolo County and beyond. So I just wanted to start talking a little bit, finding out about some of your background before we talk about what work you're doing, and I just found out that you actually were born and raised in Davis, is that what you said? Well, I got here at about age three, so I do consider it a hometown that some people may still consider me a foreigner. Yes, right, there's certain people, if you're not born in Davis, it doesn't count. So you call yourself a bicycle advocate, I would hope, judging by all the work that you're doing. And how did this come about as far as your passion for bicycling? I know sort of growing up in Davis, it's sort of, like you said, in your DNA, it's something that you're just used to doing, did you bike all when you were growing up? Well, you know, when I went to elementary school, there wasn't a hail like there was today, but really, most kids got to school on their own or groups of friends and parents weren't driving them there. I don't even know if walking there was something that parents did. Kids seemed to go with other kids. And I really enjoyed that sense of independence and just feeling capable that I could get myself to school. So I think very early on that was there, probably starting at maybe age eight. I think that's the same with me as getting to school and I would ride my bike. I didn't grow up in Davis, but I would ride my bike and before that, we would take the bus, but it was always sort of an independent time between the parents that go into school where you were on your own getting to school. Independence, self-motivation. We worry that maybe kids are getting out of high school and they don't have a sense of self-motivation and yet we don't give kids the opportunity to do it. And transportation's an everyday way we can. Yeah, transportation, I definitely agree with that. Do you think bicycling in particular is a great form of transportation? It seems to be. You know, it's still basically the machine that was originally designed. It's not that much different from the creation of the bicycle. It is just such an efficient way to move in that you just get so much bang for the buck. And the other thing is bikes don't have to be expensive to work. Kids especially, used bikes are great. You know, a bike, a good quality bike can have an eternity of lifetimes. Right, and I agree with you on every point. I'm singing to the choir. I know. I don't always get the opportunity to talk to people who are as passionate about bicycles. But it's definitely when you meet them, you share a lot of the same sentiments as far as transportation. So you're probably a transportation advocate as well. Like public transportation. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I consider myself a transportation rider. If it's in my community, if it's in Davis and I live in East Davis, wherever it is, I will use my bike as often as possible. On days I do need to use my car, I try to offset that by running several errands at one time. And we can all do that. And in fact, it makes for a much friendlier, more comfortable community. And that's really important to the bike campaign is that it's not just about you get on your bike. It's about all of us and how we get all the things we need. We need food. We need to get kids to school. We need to get to doctor's appointments. And the longer I've been riding my bike, well, I've been riding it my entire life. But I'm definitely not an anti-car person. And I think you mentioned that earlier that you're in the same camp. You're not really hardcore anti-car activists. It's more just about promoting a highly efficient way of transportation. And especially within the community, I would really like to see a switch. Right now we have about in Davis and we're very fortunate here. We have about 25% bike share. That means 75% of everybody out there and every trip in Davis, 75% of these people are getting in their car to do it. It might just be a half mile away to get milk. How much better would we all feel if we could change the car mode to 25% and walk to the grocery store? Right. We would really feel good. Well, and it's just the benefits you get from bicycling are sort of exponential, right? I mean. Well, even if you don't ride a bike, you're gonna benefit from less carbon monoxide poisoning in the air. Yeah, and not to mention parking and the convenience of having a bicycle. And the cost of parking. The cost for our community as a whole. It costs a lot of money to provide a place to park a two to three ton vehicle. Yeah, I've gone in different portions of my life without a car and being so used to using a bike and train and this type of thing for transportation. It's kind of nice knowing that you can sort of operate independent of that whole system. Speaking of that system, you grew up in Davis, so you've seen changes in infrastructure. Even in Davis, Davis is known as everyone knows as a bicycle capital, gold, platinum. I don't even know. Platinum rated. Platinum rated. And have you seen the infrastructure in Davis and other cities sort of becoming more and more friendly to bicycles? Throughout the nation, everybody's talking about it. One, because cities can't afford to just keep paving streets and creating more parking spaces for cars. They just don't have the money for it. And whether it be New York City, and last week I met somebody from Concord here in the East Bay, it is so much easier to convert and make the street more accessible to people. And really the chant we need to remember is that streets are for people. They're not for cars. They're for people that need to get to different things in our community. And of course, if you look back in the history of paving and putting in roads, it was for the League of American Wheelmen. That's exactly right. So bicycling was actually somewhat the driving force behind creating roads in the first place. So yeah, of course bicyclists belong on the road and we are traffic, right? There's no difference between. So using that analogy, I think that it's only fitting that bicyclists are getting more infrastructure spend. Let's move on to some of what your campaign is about. You started something called the bike campaign. Bicycling campaign? The bike campaign. The bike campaign and our mission is to greatly increase bike riding. We would like that to evolve in the streets, just being more comfortable for families to get to schools, to parks, and to shopping. Just imagine that, what that would look like for you everybody, people with small children to feel comfortable to be in the street, to go shopping, we'd be waving at each other, it'd be Mayberry all over. Yeah, yeah, I think it does feel, and we don't have to just imagine it, we can see some pictures in Europe in different places where bicycling is just a part of everyday life, right? I've been to Holland. I have drunk the Kool-Aid. Let's do it. The first bike lanes that came to Davis, California were installed because of a couple that went to visit Holland and said, wow, we could do that too. And we're seeing that happening across Rippling all the way across the United States. Yes, and so as part of your campaign, or why did you start it? I mean, why you personally just felt that you could start this campaign, start this nonprofit in order to enact change at the school level? Did you see sort of that there was a lack of training at that age, or sort of a, how did you? There's a lack of willingness, most often on the part of the parents, to kind of break from the herd and to pay attention to their kids and the messages that they're sending them and the kind of community that they're creating. And as people make a decision as to how they're gonna transport their kids to kindergarten, let's say, that may establish the transportation patterns for the next 12 years after kindergarten and that if those kids are being driven, they're gonna continue to be driven and then they're gonna ask for a car and then we gotta park that one too. Yeah, yeah, so. And that's starting to now break down in that 50% of fewer 16-year-olds are getting driver's licenses. My daughter is a college graduate. She lives in San Francisco. She's 25 years old, almost 26, and has no driver's license. And this is no longer a stigma. This is the new evolution of transportation. It's for everybody, not just one person taking up a lot of space. Did you find that the culture surrounding bicycling at a young age was changing or? Very much, so I think driving has definitely become something that implies status. See what I have, therefore what I own and what my worth is, and if you don't have that, there must be something wrong with you. There's a stigmatization that happened to cycling within the last, well, my lifetime of riding a bike here in Davis. And you felt that before that it was more accepted? Definitely, it was just what you did. It was the norm. The streets were to be safe enough for children to go to school. Come on, people. We can't say that we care about the environment and not care about getting our kids to school comfortably on bicycles or walking. What are the biggest hurdles you see then in your work with the bike campaign as far as getting people on? You mentioned the stigma. Is that the biggest hurdle or is it sort of a fear of safety? I think the fear of safety is most often an excuse. I think mostly now we have a disconnected piece of population, whether they come from another country or they come from another county, they did not grow up using a bicycle. So your experience and my experience was very different from theirs. So people aren't generally going to encourage their children to do something they don't need to do. So we do a lot of training of new cyclists and I myself became certified as a League of American Bicyclists instructor. And people go, oh, I know how to ride a bike, but do you know how to ride a bike in an urban environment with your children? How do you move things on your bike? When there's gonna be a lot of inclement weather, how do you dress? There's a lot to know. It's a lifetime of learning. I agree. And I think sometimes probably that is taken for granted is to, yes, I know how to ride a bike, but how comfortable are you using it for transportation on an everyday basis? Right, we want people comfortable and confident, but mostly we want people to really have fun when we're doing this. And so being able to keep the bike repaired and maintained is really important because if you don't have support in that area, you could be having a real grind of a ride. It's not gonna be fun. Right, and so out of that, out of the bike campaign effort, which we'll go back to a little bit, one of your programs is called the Bike Garage. The Bike Garage. And does that start specifically because you saw that people need some education? Well, and they needed bikes. So some people either didn't have bikes or they had a bike. You can find a bike in just about any garage in the United States. They had a bike, but it wasn't operative. The tires are flat, the chain was rusty. Maybe the bike didn't even fit, but they didn't know it. They just found it painful to ride it. So there's a lot people don't know about bikes. So the Bike Garage accepts donations of bikes and we recycle them and we get them underneath people that want to learn and who really feel motivated to do something, to take action in their own community. So I noticed the Bike Garage is located in Woodland and the non-profit sort of serves all of Yolo County. That's correct. I'm wondering, and we could put up a map of actually where the Bike Garage is located. This is a map of Woodland. You can see the Bike Garage is off of Gibson there or kind of off of... Off of Gibson and Kaloma and we're very close to Woodland Adult Education, which is a perfect location. Lots of people taking English as a second language courses. So they're new to the United States and we want to give them mobility. So and the idea... So tell me a little bit about locating in Woodland and what some choices that went into that. So number one, just having a place to go. We were given a space to occupy in a middle school and it was in front of that same middle school that I had the epiphany of why are all these cars parked in front of this school and why are overweight children coming out of those cars and most of those kids, 75% of them, were on the free breakfast and free lunch program. So I can't believe that kids aren't getting a subliminal message that perhaps their parents are struggling even to put gas in the car but they don't have enough money left over to provide them with breakfast and lunch. And that's not a message I think kids need to receive. So with the Bike Garage there, what benefits do you see for them? We repair a lot of bikes. We do a lot of teaching. I mean, we see kids every day that nobody's ever thought to put a helmet on them. Or to give them any writing instructions as to what side of the street do you ride on, hand signals, lights, high visibility clothing, rain gear. You just threw them out there in the middle of the street on a bike and we need to do better than that. It really needs to start before kindergarten. Sure. Have you found a lot of support for these efforts that you've done? Tremendously. Mind-blowing support. So Woodland was a community where I was told that the only person riding a bike was somebody with a DUI. And Woodland has come together, the mayors that I've worked with, the city council, the city staff leaders like the city manager and economic development and they are creating a community that's bike-friendly and have already received the bronze designation from the League of American Bicyclists as a bicycle-friendly community. And they're committed. They want to go for the gold. That's fantastic. And being that you're from Davis, do they see you as an outsider or sort of part of the community? Woodland people are so nice. They adopted me. I feel like I'm truly part of the family. That's awesome. And you know, we're almost out of time. So I knew it was a short interview. So if people want more information, where can they go to learn about the bike campaign? Our website is Chalkful of Information. She put it out there. And we are TheBikeCampaign.com, very easy. And if you want to reach out and call me, our number is on the website or you can call me here in Davis. It's a Davis number 753-1125. Okay, well, thank you. We've been talking to Maria Contreras-Taybot and I really appreciate you coming in. Your efforts are, yeah, we'll be following closely as to how your efforts will, I'm sure, be expanding and some of the support you're getting. So hopefully we'll have you back in some other day. Thank you so much. All right, you've been watching in the studio and my name is Jeff Shaw and stay tuned for the next episode.